We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emili Jashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website as well. Today we are joined by Charles
Blahouse. Charles is the Jay Fish and Lillian F. Smith Chair and Senior
Research Strategist over at the Mercada Center at George Mason University. Charles, thanks
so much for joining us, Thanks for having me on. Well, it's
baseball season, finally, at last, it's baseball season. And Charles,
you wrote a piece for Discourse called what Baseball Teaches Us? And one way
I wanted to start this conversation is just by asking you, Charles, where
your particular affinity from baseball comes. Is it something that you loved in your
childhood? What is it for you with baseball? Well, it's definitely an
interest that I picked up in my childhood. I was fortunate to have a
very dear friend in elementary school. He and I spent a lot of time
talking about baseball, collecting baseball cards, looking over baseball statistics, watching Pittsburgh
Pirates games, so that love of baseball was was nurtured very early on.
What probably made me particularly hopeless is that the Pirates team that I had the
good fortune to root for was spectacularly successful the very first year that I followed
avidly and collected baseball cards. The Pirates went on to win the World Series
as overcoming the heavily favored Baltimore Oriols in the nineteen seventy one World Series,
and the Pirates remained a wonderful team to root for my entire childhood, with
players like Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargel, and I really got spoiled, and
in some ways it distorted my view of life because the Pirates would pretty much
always come back to win even when things looked darkest, So it made me
irrationally optimistic throughout a lot of my life. It's funny that you say that,
because actually my next question was going to be what was it like growing
up as a staunch Pittsburgh Pirates fan with such a storied history in the franchise.
It sounds like, really, Charles, it was great it was.
It was great. I mean it was great. First of all, you
had the nineteen seventy one series title, which was not only great to see
the Pirates win, but you know, by nineteen seventy one, everyone knew
Roberto Clemente was the great Star and the Pirates we called him the great One.
And then he lived up to that in the World Series, right,
he produced heroic after heroic in the World's Series. So I got to see
my heroes performing in the big moments. But I again, not only were
the Pirates a very successful team, they were an exceptionally groundbreaking and fun loving
team. They were a very diverse team. It was recognized only really decades
after the fact that they were the first team to put on the field a
lineup that was entirely either African Americans or black Latin Americans. So that was
barely remarked upon when that happened in September nineteen seventy one. It was kind
of noticed later. But the Pirates, again, they were a very diverse
group, a very fun loving group. They were a very relaxed group under
pressure, and they were successful throughout the decade, and they crowned my elementary
through high school experience by winning the World Series in seventy one and then winning
it again in seventy nine, both times in comeback fashion. So it was
a great experience. It's funny as you were saying that, I was thinking
about, you know, the long suffering Brewers and the Bucks. During my
childhood, we had a great team in the Packers in Wisconsin, but Miller
Park opened, I think that was two thousand. There was so much excitement
about the Brewers and we were long suffering and you know, still though those
memories, for a lot of the reasons that you write about are really powerful
that you know, baseball is such a here's the quote I actually have it.
You quote Red Barber Brooklyn Dodgers announcers saying baseball is dull, only two
dull minds, which is probably a bit of an insult to some people who
are listening who find baseball to be dull, which at points in my adulthood
I really have found baseball to us sometimes we find numbingly mind numbingly dull.
But I think maybe that's because we're used to such a fast pace in sports
like the NBA and the NFL. Now with passing and lack of defense in
basketball. But Charles, this point is such an interesting one, and you
write at length about it. Again, folks can read this in discourse.
You say, I attribute many of the analytical instincts I deploy as a professional
adult studying economics to my childhood experience as a baseball fan. Can you elaborate
on that? Yeah, I'm happy to. Now. First of all,
let me issue a little disclaimer up front. I recognize that not everyone is
as nerdy and mathy and deepy as I as I was. Okay, so
I'm an extreme case. I recognize that. But my thesis is that it's
not just me that if you follow baseball as a kid, you develop a
comfort with numbers in mathematical ways of thinking that you probably don't if you're not
a baseball fan, or at least not to the same degree. And again,
so again, not everyone's as cookie about it as I was. But
I would venture to say, and I say a version of this in the
article, that if you show, you know, even a casual fan,
the back of a baseball card and you see a stat line that says,
this guy has thirty five home runs and one hundred and forty strikeouts and zero
stolen bases in a two thirty five batting average, they're going to form a
mental image probably of a stocky, muscle bound for spaceman type. But if
you show them the back of a baseball card and they read this guy hit
three thirty five, he hit twelve triples, he stole forty five bases,
you know, and you know, they're going to develop a very different image
of sort of lean, fleet footed centerfielder type. And my point in raising
that is that you don't have to really delve deeply into the mathematics and analytics
of baseball to understand that something happens to you when you follow baseball. Part
of what I think was joyful about my own baseball fandom as a kid is
that I wasn't, you know, looking for things. I wasn't looking up
things, you know, I wasn't hunting for information. I was just kind
of looking around, you know, right the way kids do. And when
you just look at things in this sort of open ended way, whether you're
looking at the stadium scoreboard or looking at the backs of baseball cards, you
start to notice stuff, and you notice patterns, and you start deriving impressions
and meaning out of numerical data in ways that you know, sadly, we
find it difficult to do in our you know, over stimulated world we live
in now right where there's information constantly coming at us, and you know,
we're scrolling through the internet hunting for this, hunting for that. But that's
a very different experience from just sort of open ended staring and observing and letting
insights and impressions wash over you. And again, baseball I think leads people
through that process in a very productive way, in a way that people don't
even know that it's happening, right, But I think most people who are
baseball fans would recognize the truth of what I said about how you get very
distinct and vivid images just from looking at numbers. And that's not something that
not that's something that everyone is comfortable with and used to doing. But the
baseball teaches people how to do that. And can you talk a little bit
actually just about the experience, and maybe you know more than I do about
how influential baseball card trading still is among kids. I mean, I know,
obviously there are a lot of adult collectors, and even then it's sort
of faded, But how that as a child, just the sort of tangible
numbers and information on the back of a baseball card. How do those memories
when you look back on them? How did you learn from the baseball cards
themselves. Wow, that's a great question. And let me let me first
start by saying, there's all sorts of baseball card collectors. Right. You've
got the gamblers, right, you have the people who colleck cards and they're
they're flipping for cards at school and playing the games trying to win each other's
cards. And you have the traders, and you have the people who put
the cards and the spokes of their bicycle. And I wasn't doing any of
that stuff. And you also have the people who look at it as a
collectible or an investment, right, And that that completely changed the whole market
for baseball cards, thankfully after I had emerged from childhood. But I'll tell
you I'd love your question because it caused me to reflect them exactly how I
went through it. I had a walk to our corner store that was I'm
guessing probably about a mile plus long, because it would take me about half
an hour to walk it back, and I would walk through, you know,
pass through the woods to get back to my house. So that was
a long walk, and I would I would spend a dime to get a
pack of ten baseball cards. So you're walking goodness. Yeah, so you
know, you had half an hour to do nothing but look at these baseball
cards on the way home. And by the time I got home, I
knew these baseball cards backwards and forwards, and to this day, even though
sadly this is another tragic story and I really don't want to get into it
here. Sadly I no longer have my childhood baseball card collection, but I
could still tell you if you were to show me cards from that nineteen seventy
one set, I'd be able to tell you I had that card, I
didn't have this card. I had this card, I didn't have that card,
just because I stared at them for so long. And like I said
earlier, you look at numbers long enough, patterns start to emerge. You
start to notice, you know, as I mentioned in the article, patterns
of repeating decimals. Right again, you're not trying to learn that stuff,
and school wasn't. I haven't started teaching me long division yet or anything like
that. But just the process of looking at baseball cards got me to recognize,
oh, all right, but if someone has five decisions, or six
decisions or seven decisions, their winning percentage is going to look like this,
or it's going to look like that. There are only a few possibilities,
and there were very obvious patterns and how the decimals repeated. And again,
you know, I don't want to bore listeners who are who are not that
interested in math, but the point is that there is a comfort and familiarity
with division and decimals and you know, rational members and all that stuff that
comes almost osmodically out of just staring at the backs of baseball cards. That
is a really beautiful way to put it. You know, at the skate
rink, they used to have football cards when I was a kid, and
I have very it's a sore spot between myself and my mother. What happened
to my binder full of those football cards on that point. You know,
there's so much consternation or you know, maybe it's it's just a very polarizing
discussion right now about whether this the sort of what's the best way to put
it the over I mean, probably the best word that people would use is
the analytical aspect of baseball going to extremes, the extreme analytics right now,
huge debate sort of has baseball fans in different directions on this. What is
the way to balance it? Do you think the sport has gone too far
and maybe sports in general towards analytics, or do you think there's a good,
you know, maybe healthy medium that can be reached. Yeah, I
mean I look at this from both directions. I mean, first of all,
I'm you know, I'm an analytics guy. I'm a math guy.
When when saber metrics was in its infancy in the seventies and eighties, I
was all over it. I was, uh, you know, joining and
trying to develop formulas to to do a better job of you know, replicating
you know, the actual efficacy of a baseball player and all of that.
So it's very interested in that. But I do agree with the criticism that
it's possible to take it too far. And this is one of the points
I make in my piece, which is just you know, uncritically reciting numbers
and giving them the you know, the stamp of authority. It's not the
same as understanding anything, right. I Mean, when I was little,
I knew who had the higher batting average who had the lower batting average,
and I stupidly assumed that meant this guy was better than that guy when that
wasn't true. At Batting average was certainly something that correlated with the quality of
a guy's hitting or the value of his output, but it was very imperfect.
It was just one of many metrics, and not really even one of
the most useful ones. And today you have a lot of people who can
just you know, they were, oh, this guy is it leads the
league in war right, wins above replacement, but you know, ninety percent,
and they have no idea how to calculate it, what it really means
to the extent they don't understand the extent to which it really measures a player's
value or doesn't measure it. And to me, that's not very fun,
right, It's not real understanding to just recite a number. It's much more
interesting to try to understand where that number comes from and be constantly looking for
places where our understanding is incomplete, at places where a player's true value might
actually diverge from what some formula tells us it is. So you can get
carried away with the analytics I think, and I think it's just you know,
it's just human nature, right, it's what we do. We learn
to possess information, We learn to recite information a lot better than we learn
how to critically analyze information. So I would join in that criticism. The
one other thing I'd say about it is that there have been people who say,
well, analytics are ruining the game, and you know, I don't
agree with that at all. I actually think, you know, it's not
analytics fault. I mean, analytics is just people trying to figure out how
to win. Right. You can't blame teams for trying to figure out how
to win and trying to figure out better ways to win. If the game
becomes boring when teams deduce how to win, then you change the conditions in
which the game is played. You don't blame the analytics. So I do
think it's true that analytics discovered that guys with a lot of power who hit
the ball in the air a lot, who drew a lot of walks and
struck out a lot were more valuable than they had been recognized as being historically,
and that led to a kind of boring brand of baseball. Right,
you didn't you didn't have as many people putting the ball in play. You
had too many walks, too many strikeouts, and you know, just not
enough running around the bases. So my attitude is, change the conditions.
Don't blame the analytics, you know, move the fences back, strength the
foul territory, make me change the limits of the bats, maybe make the
balls a little sofer. There's a lot of things you can do instead of
pointing the finger at analytics. I mean, if you make the conditions of
the game more exciting, the analytics will go to a more exciting place.
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discourse. But could you tell us kind of about those early days, because
you do write about sabermetrics and getting involved and what must be to my non
mathematical brain, it sense so very boring. But from perspective of some of
like you draws, it must have been really electric back in you know,
those early days. Can you just tell us about what it was like?
Yeah, I mean it was electric. It was electric, and I will
tell you I still remember itself. It's a flashball memory for me. I
had just gone out to graduate school, and my last paycheck for my summer
job after undergrad hadn't cleared yet, so I had like forty bucks to get
me through the month of September there my first month away in grad school,
which meant I didn't have much of an entertainment budget. I allocated myself,
you know, five dollars for personal entertainment to get me through that month,
and I spent it on this Bill James baseball abstract, which I found in
a used bookstore. And at the time, I wasn't able to move into
my new apartment yet, so I was actually sleeping on someone's sofa, and
I still remember lying there in that sofa paging through this look and it was
like all these you know, lights were going off and explosions and fireworks and
hosannas, you know, like, oh my god, this is the stuff
that I always wanted to understand but never did understand. And the beauty of
Bill James is that he was actually interested in figuring out, you know,
how baseball worked and what what actually were the components of a successful offense.
And he liked to test whether you you know, all the cliches and tropes
that you heard on Game of the Week broadcasts were actually true and a lot
of them weren't, And so it was it was fascinating. Now there were
people who took to Bill James and there were people who didn't the I think,
first of all, if you were a defender of conventional wisdom, then
Bill James really offended you back then because he was tearing a part of what
a lot of what people thought they knew. But also if some people just
don't like the math, and I think they they resented Bill James for using
math, my reply to that is, you don't have to know any math
to enjoy Bill James. I think he's the greatest living historian of baseball.
If you just read his books and don't even go through the math parts he
has, he's he's an incredible, incredibly vivid depictor of earlier eras in American
history, early earlier eras in baseball history. So there's a there's a tremendous
amount to be gleaned from his work. He was just interested in understanding baseball
across the board, which included a lot of mathematical work, but it really
ultimately doesn't depend on So it was it was a great revelation for me changed
how I understood baseball and changed how a lot of people understood baseball. What
do you think about fantasy baseball? I'm really curious fr your perspective on that.
Especially, you know, there's a we could open up a can of
worms about the morality of gambling. But just I think fantasy baseball is a
place where people who share a lot of interests like yours. Again, it's
polar I think some people love it, some people hate it. Some people
think it destroys all of the fun. But on the other hand, you
have guys who are just immersed in numbers and analytics as fans of a sport.
So what do you think about fantasy baseball, Charles? It honestly doesn't
interest me very much. And it's funny because when I was in grad school,
I actually developed a little fantasy baseball league before these things existed, and
I tried to run it as a side business. And I did, I
mean to the extent that I could. It was a pretty labor intensive thing
for me to do on my you know, personal, little personal computer.
But basically what I tried to do was develop a fantasy system that would actually
they would play actual games. You would you would take the you know,
the performance of the players each week and then and then actually put their stats
together as though they were performing on the same field together and playing games against
the starting lineups, against your your opponent's managerial selections. And I had a
great fun doing that. But that's not the way that fantasy baseball ultimately went.
I mean, the way fantasy baseball tends to work now is you you
know, it just keeps track of how players are doing very statistical categories.
You know, so players get this amount of hits or RBIs where I don't
even know what the categories are anymore. And just to me, just you
know, it does just feel a lot like gambling. It feels more like,
okay, you're just betting on which players are go to a mass which
statistics in a way that isn't very I don't know, it isn't very closely
related to how things would actually play out on a real baseball field, and
so it's not terribly interesting to me. I understand that people are really into
it. If I if I were to go back and try to re enter
that world, I would try to invent a completely different type of fantasy baseball
where you're actually taking player statistics and having them play real games against each other,
and that would be more fun for me, right, you know,
I also want to ask you about this sort of particular americanness of baseball.
That's one of the things that I know fosters or contributes to why people have
such deep admiration and love for baseball, especially as it's tied to their childhood
and nostalgia for maybe what some people see at a different time, although that's
arguable in the country, but it is such an American sport, Charles,
from your perspective, from your the perspective of of your fandom of baseball,
how does that factor into your memories and your love of the game. It's
it's really it's very real. For me. I think that baseball is a
game, right, It's it's a game. It's a game without a clock.
It's very different from all these other sports that we are might say addicted
to now, right, Basketball, American football, you know, most sports
and I'm channeling George Carlin here, but but you know, most sports run
very differently. Right. You have this clock that's going and we're going to
watch the clock. Is there have time left? To do this is enough
time left to do that. And each team is competing to try to get
some ball or puck or put you know, some other object into the other
team's net or goal or end zone or whatever. That's how most sports work.
Baseball is very much rooted in sort of the American pastoral past, and
it's really it's a game. It doesn't have a clock, right, there's
no timing. The rhythm of the game is determined by the events on the
field. There's no running out the clock. No matter how far you are
ahead. You have to put the ball on the strike zone and give the
other player a chance to hit it. And as long as the other player
succeeds in continuing to hit, you cannot defeat them. Right, You actually
have to defeat the other player. You can't just depend on time running out.
And the other thing that strikes me as different about baseball is that it's
much more like a child's game, right, if you think about the stuff
we do as kids. I don't know if you played kick the can when
you were little, or you know whatever. You know, I haven't thought
about that game in years, right, but I think about it. Right,
You kick the can, you run around, you touch bases, and
then you run back to the starting point. Baseball is like that, right,
You hit something, and you run around and you touch the trees and
you you know, you step on this, step on that, and you
get back home. It's it's much more closely related to that, or to
games of tag and things like that. Then it's related to basketball, hockey,
soccer, American football, any of those games. And so I think
there's a there's a playfulness to it, sort of a childlike playfulness to it,
that that we don't have another games. Other games are more they're more
replications of combat, right, but but not baseball. Baseball kind of ties
you to these these more childlike rhythms, and that there's an innocence to it
that I think is very beautiful. And it does you know, if I
want to feel eight years old again, I'm not going to watch a football
game, but I but I will watch a baseball game. That's such an
interesting way to put it. Are you optimistic about the future of baseball?
Again? I know people there are people who are very down on it.
Too many games a season goes on, too on, et cetera, et
cetera. But you know where things stand now, there have been some fabulous
seasons in recent years. You know, I'm sure from maybe your perspective,
every season is a good one. But do you feel like is there is
there anything that MLB could be doing? You mentioned a couple of things earlier,
but is there anything MLB could be doing to make the game better or
go back to a better place for the game, or go forward to a
better place for the game. And are you ultimately optimistic? I think I
am. You know, first of all, I just think the game is
It's a great game, right and the beauty of the game is that you
always have a chance. Right. It's not, you know, it's not
as deterministic a sport as many sports. In most sports, the better team
wins the vast majority of games, and baseball, you know, the best
team in the league might be lucky to win two thirds of its games.
So in any given day, you know, things are competitive, and postseason
will always be competitive. You know, it's never a lost cause in baseball,
and I think that helps. I also, I have to say I
give them credit for being willing to change the game. I don't like all
the changes they've made. There are some that I think were unnecessary. You
know, I think some of them are just silly, you know, putting
a runner automatically on second base or whatever, and you know, just a
lot of these and banning the shift and a lot of things. I don't
think we're necessary. But the fact that they are willing to tinker with the
game to make it better, to me, is a very good sign.
They're no longer saying, all right, this is the way it's always been
done, so we're always going to do it this way forever. They actually
thought, how can we speed this game up? And they did it.
The pitch clock, I think is great. The pace of the game is
better now. I think there are other things I think they could do,
but I think baseball has made itself a lot more entertaining. You know,
the game that I grew up watching, it took two and a quarter two
and a half hours to play a game, and it had gradually dragged out
to three and a half and it was excruciating. But now they've got the
time shortened up a lot, and I think that that really matters. It's
one of the most striking differences between the game of my youth and the game
as it had evolved into in the last few years. I mean, if
you watch clips of baseball as it's played in nineteen seventies, it was so
brisk. You know that the pitcher did not take very long between pitches,
and they're getting back to that, and I think that's good. So so
yeah, I'm optimistic. I do think it's it's a sport that requires the
best of us. You have to be willing to spend some time just thinking
and contemplating. And if you're you know, if you're a compulsive doom scroller
or a channel switcher, it's not the game for you. But but I
think, you know, it's it's going to have an appeal going forward,
And so yeah, I'm optimistic. Somewhat of a chilling thought as young people's
attention spans get more and more short every year. Another question that I wanted
to ask is how you prefer to watch the game. Do you prefer watching
on TV? What's the best way to watch a baseball game in your opinion?
Best food? What's the best way to do it? I really you
know, baseball. This is really an interesting question because I think baseball works
really well in indirect media. So, for example, I grew up listening
to Bob Prince, who was the greatest, I don't care what anybody says,
the greatest play by play man in the history of any sport anywhere,
just absolutely riveting. He was a master, and he was brilliant at using
the pace of his speech, knowing when to shut up and just let the
sounds take over. And so radio was my best way to do it growing
up. And you know, I enjoyed listening to Bob Prince's radio broadcast as
much as I enjoyed watching The Pirates on TV or going to the ballpark.
The other interesting thing about baseball is it's fun to follow baseball even when it's
just you're not really watching it. So, for example, if you just
watch catching like a game cast on ESPN dot com or something right where you
just you know, you're you're you're just watching a graphic, you know,
which shows you here's the counts and here's where the runners are. You know.
That's the way it used to be back in the pre radio days,
the pre radio days. If there was a big game going on, if
there's a World Series game going on, they would create this big board in
the middle of the city, you know, and then the telegraph would give
news on what happened, and then they would move, you know, they'd
move these little symbols around the diamond showing you where this runner was or where
that runner was and how many balls and strikes they were, and fans would
just you know, turn out as a big crowd and stare up at that
board and watch the I'm putting air quotes up now. But the broadcast of
the game baseball, really it's one of those games that remains very vivid even
if you're watching it on that type of board or you know, through the
changing ellus of a score sheet or a game cast update on the internet.
So you know, I think it's not like football. You want to watch
it, right, but well you gotta watch it on TV or you lose
ninety percent of it. But baseball, I think loses very little when you
switch from TV to radio or even to indirect updates. Hello, thank you
for listening to The Federalist. This is columnist and podcaster Sarah Carter, and
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good times. US Burgers fans were lucky to grow up with Bob Yuker two,
so that resonates absolutely is an interesting That's a really interesting answer. I
hadn't totally thought about that. Hot dog, popcorn, cracker Jack? What's
your go to? Charles? Lately, I've been craving Crackerjack, and I've
been wondering whether that's because it's opening day Jack in years, but I have
this craving for it. Yeah, a good, good hot dog is a
wonderful thing. Yeah, but I have to say growing up the three of
Her Stadium in Pittsburgh, food was terrible. It was terrible. So Crackerjack
is probably as good as we were going to get. That's really fun.
Well, actually to my two final questions we're going to be let's start with
this one. Do you have a take on the best stadium in the country
to watch a game? Wow? Well, I love Campon Yards, love
Camvion Yards. PNC Park in Pittsburgh is great. I'm biased. I think
Washington Nationals Park is an underrated park. It gets it gets yeah, it
seems to be regarded as someone as of the middle of the pack mediocrity.
And I think it's a terrific park. I really do. Camden Yards has
a has a beauty and romantic element to it, a very nostalgic look to
it that Nationals Park doesn't have. But I actually I think Nationals Park is
terrific. And of course, you know, I love you know that,
I believe it or not. I've never been to Wrigley Field, so that's
a that's a big omission. Uh. You know, Fenway and its reconfigured
form is terrific too. But yeah, I would say Camden Yards probably,
Yeah, no, that's a that's a great answer. I agree with you
on the Russian Nationals Park too, especially. I mean, if you get
those high up seats, actually they're cheaper, but you can see the river,
you can see the city. It's a bad way to go, it
really isn't. And that and that promenade that goes, you know, between
the lower boxes and the higher boxes, you know, around the outfield towards
the parking areas, it's it's you know, it's it gives you a great
sense of the place. And now finally, the cracker Jack's comment is again
sort of perfect because I was going to ask you as a last question about
the sensory experience of Opening Day. It's so I think exciting for everyone that
it coincides with spring. Everyone who's a baseball fan at least, there's something
about that. It's the kickoff to warmer days and to summer, and for
a lot of people, they just love the smell of the fresh cut grass,
the experience of maybe being able to sit outside and watch a game,
especially if you're from a colder part of the country. Charles, can you
describe that for us? What is it about Opening Day that you love and
that you think other people love so much? Yeah, I think it's you
know, the older I get, the more I think my mood is governed
by the rhythm of the seasons. And there's something, you know, it's
just this time of year, the days are getting longer, and they're getting
longer really rapidly, and there is a certain smell in the air and everything
is coming back to life, a certain fragrance and it and it's a you
know, it's a feeling of unlimited possibility and future growth, and it's a
yeah, it's a it's a beautiful time. And you know, there's there's
all the old cliches that you know, on opening Day, every team has
the same chance and and everyone starts out in the same magic number. And
that's all true. But even if you you know, recognize realistically, but
not every team has exactly the same chance, I still think it's just it's
a it's a reinvigorating time of year. And you know, I think almost
everyone remembers their first time going to a ballpark and seeing that little, you
know, identic patch of grass there. You know, you go up to
the stadium and you see from the outside that looks very grand and imposing,
and then you know you're going up through the ramps and then you get that
glimpse in between the seats and it's like this glimpse of heaven. It's just
it's just mind blowing. And I think that it's like a little patch of
Eden in the middle of our cities, and it's it's a beautiful thing.
M Charles. That's a perfect way to end. Charles Bajaus is the Jay
Fish and Lee and S. Smith Chair and Senior Research Strategist over at the
Mercada Center at George Mason University. You can read his wonderful essay on baseball
again. It's called What Baseball Teaches Us over at Discoursemagazine dot com. Charles,
thank you so much for chatting with us this morning. Thanks for having
me. Of course, you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio
Hour. I'm Emilie Trishinski, culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then, be the lovers of freedom and anxious
for the fray